Latest articles

Resident Artist

Two Coats Resident Artist Dale Emmart, April 12–17, 2026

Contributed by Sharon Butler / In April, Two Coats of Paint welcomes resident artist Dale Emmart. Her work reflects a sustained and expansive meditation on rope — in oil, ink on washi, woodcut, and artist books. For her, it is a widely evocative pictorial object owing to its sheer versatility. Essentially unchanged since the Egyptians first documented ropemaking in 4000 BCE, it admits of a remarkable range of associations: industriousness and energy, lethargy and repose, entanglement and freedom.

Continue Reading →
Group Shows

Springs Projects: Concerted vibes

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / “Personal Space,” the group show now up at Springs Projects, is especially impressive for the steady, uninflected confidence it reflects in art as a part of life, devoid of commercial pandering or sheepish self-doubt. Considerable credit for this virtue goes to Tommy White, co-founder of the gallery. As he hung the work, all made by his adult students from the Art Students’ League, and forged the show’s overall coherence, White consulted the artists to ensure that each individual voice was preserved. His curatorial hand is masterful, harmonizing seeming divergence and distinguishing apparent similarity. For a group show to sing, of course, the artists themselves need to possess a sufficiency of talent and heart. This gang does.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Lois Dodd: A balm against cynicism

Contributed by David Whelan / I first saw a Lois Dodd painting in 2004. View through Elliot’s Shack Looking South was part of a group show at our college gallery when I was a freshman. The painting absolutely stunned me and served as a touchstone throughout my education and early adulthood. Dodd’s solo show “A Radiant Simplicity” at The Art Gallery at Brooklyn College might have done the same for others.

Continue Reading →
Solo Shows

Amelie Mancini: Longing and wonder

Contributed by Caroline Otis Heffron / Amelie Mancini’s debut solo exhibition at Massey Klein Gallery, offers poignant reflections on women, enticing viewers with harmonious colors and intricate patterns that initially convey a sense of contentment and balance. But her layering techniques, involving translucent paint, and repeating motifs – reminiscent of  Vuillard, Matisse, and Modersohn-Becker – encourage closer study of gesture and expression. As the viewer moves in, archetypal faces emerge with expressions of longing and wonder, leaving ambivalence. 

Continue Reading →
Ideas about Painting Museum Exhibitions

St. Francis at the Frick

Contributed by Ken Buhler / There is an unsubstantiated claim in Catholic lore that the number of books written about St. Francis of Assisi (c. 1181–1226) is second only to the number written about Jesus. But keen interest in the life of St. Francis has been continuous. During his lifetime, his many followers had already established a religious order in his name. My particular interest began towards the end of the twentieth century, when my job in the Frick Collection afforded me many hours, essentially alone, in the galleries with Giovanni Bellini’s much-beloved St. Francis in the Desert, which depicts an ecstatic St. Francis in an idyllic landscape. 

Continue Reading →
Museum Exhibitions

Kathy Butterly’s small-scale magnitude

Contributed by Bill Arning / Kathy Butterly’s largest survey to date could, in theory, be boring. Thirty-five years of work in the same medium – highly glazed porcelain and earthenware – always at conspicuously small-scale, from four to 14 inches, might sound stultifying. You could perhaps imagine some visitors, having glanced at a sea of colored dots arranged on three massive irregular platforms in roughly chronological order, anticipating a hard slog and a rapid escape.

Continue Reading →
Conversation

Ezra Johnson and Matt Bollinger: Disrupting convention

Painters Ezra Johnson and Matt Bollinger work across painting and handcrafted animation, and both are drawn to the textures of everyday American life — houses, haircuts, the quiet weight of ordinary moments. Two Coats of Paint invited the two to have a conversation on the occasion of their 2026 exhibitions: Johnson’s “Home and Garden Show” at Freight + Volume in New York, and Bollinger’s “Dawn” at mother’s tankstation in Dublin. The two artists speak here as peers, moving between close readings of each other’s work and reflections on their own practices. They discuss the relationship between painting and animation, the question of when a painting is “done,” and how handmade roughness can carry more truth than technical finish.

Continue Reading →
Group Shows

Six artists meshing at Field Projects

Contributed by Will Kaplan / At the opening of “A Partial Refusal” at Field Projects, simmering conversation turned to a reverent hush within the gallery’s black painted walls. In this stirring exhibition, curator Weihui Liu has arranged the work of six artists into an immersive labyrinth that fosters a slow meander and even slower meditation in counterpoint to the preachiness and digital freneticism that surrounds us.

Continue Reading →
Group Shows

“Sonorous” in Hackney: Stairway to heaven?

Contributed by Kenneth Greiner / St. Augustine’s Tower, Hackney’s oldest building, is a late-medieval stone structure once connected to a long demolished church. At times used as a mortuary and tool shed, it’s now a museum, open once a month in this recently gentrified corner of East London. Inside the Tower are four floors for immersive art, connected by an agonizingly narrow set of stairs. Earlier this month, this improbable venue presented the group exhibition “Sonorous,” which concerned vibration as a means of communication. And it worked. The weathered crypts and headstones at the base of the tower echoed a somber song that the sound of the Tower bell magnified, rustling the cobwebs that rested in its eaves. 

Continue Reading →
Biennial

Doomscrolling 3-D + IRL: The 2026 Whitney Biennial

Contributed by Sharon Butler / The Whitney Biennial 2026 has a knack for knocking the human project, wistfully and ruefully examining the past, and planting dread about the future. Curators Marcela Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, with Beatriz Cifuentes and Carina Martinez, made 300 studio visits, ultimately winnowing the roster down to 56 artists, duos, and collectives. The curators’ definition of what is “American” is expansive; the artists’ birthplaces span the globe, and many have settled in the US after fleeing wars and other forms of political turmoil….

Continue Reading →
Screens

2025’s intrepid cinema

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / In 2025, movies seemed to catch up with and confront the Trump era. Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another – based on Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland and nimbly arraying multiple stars with Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead – is a deeply informed outcry of conscience and resistance, chiseled by satire into a grand statement. Bugonia, Yorgos Lanthimos’ creepily penetrating and funny…

Continue Reading →
Interviews

Sally Gall: What am I looking at?

Contributed by Leslie Wayne / I recently had the pleasure of visiting the artist Sally Gall in her midtown studio on a cold and snowy day – a perfect opportunity to get out of my own head and into the mind and process of someone else. Gall is a photographer of natural phenomena, yet her images are otherworldly and hard to identify. They include close-up undersides of laundry hanging from clotheslines on a windy day, faraway kites, and rock faces that look like Franz Kline paintings.

Continue Reading →
Gallery shows Solo Shows

Mira Schor: Uncensored

Contributed by Jonah James Romm / How does one acquire language? How do words shape identity and meaning? These questions might strike you upon entering Mira Schor’s exhibition “Figures of Speech” at Lyles & King. Bringing together a previously unseen body of the artist’s work from the 1980s and paintings from the last two years, the exhibition traces the compelling self-referential progression of Schor’s work over the last four decades. 

Continue Reading →
1 2 3 … 262